Feature

The Reconfiguration of International Information Infrastructure Assistance
Since 1991

by Pamela Spence RichardsBefore l99l the Soviet Union had an international information assistance
program that dwarfed that of the United States government in many specific
areas, such as conference support, book donations and support for advanced
graduate study. This Soviet system, which reached its apogee in the mid-
l980s, might be seen as a 20th century descendant of Czarist cultural
imperialism, which had Russified Eurasia from St. Petersburg to the
Northern Pacific by l9l7.

But Soviet cultural expansion differed from its predecessor in important
ways. First, Czarist efforts had limited themselves to territories
contiguous to and eventually annexed by Russia (even far-flung Alaska
actually bordered Russia), while the Soviets launched major cultural
offensives in places as geographically removed from Russia as Cuba,
Ethiopia and Vietnam. Second, Soviet technical and educational assistance
stressed not Russian culture and Orthodox Christianity but rather the
relevance to the developing world of the Soviet experience as the world's
first socialist (and officially atheist) country - one which the Soviets
believed could serve as an example for other nations, especially those
hoping to free their populations from the yoke of superstition, racism and
imperialism in order to establish productive societies whose fruits could
be shared by all citizens. Their own successful example of manipulating
information media to establish and maintain a centralized and
industrialized modern socialist society convinced the Soviets of the
importance of information infrastructure assistance to socialist countries
abroad.

Within a few years of the founding by the Soviets of the Council for
Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) in l949, Comecon began to organize
conferences where librarians and technical information center heads from
member Eastern European socialist countries (Albania, Hungary, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Rumania and, after l964, Yugoslavia)
could meet with Soviet colleagues to discuss the centralization of
information resources so beloved by the Soviets and so attractive to
countries with inadequate hard currency.

The Soviet socialist approach to information gathering, organization and
dissemination had enormous appeal abroad, for a variety of reasons beyond
its low monetary cost. As the great colonial empires were dismantled in the
decades following World War II, scores of impoverished new nations were
inspired by Russia's 20th century transition from feudal absolutism to an
apparent industrial powerhouse. The success of the Soviets in wiping out
the Czarist legacy of mass illiteracy (75%) was legendary, and the Sputnik
launching in l957 seemed to emphasize the correlation between Soviet
socialism and scientific innovation, stimulated by the efficient and
centralized dissemination of information.

Another factor in the appeal of Soviet socialist information policies was
their use in encouraging acceptance of the Marxist doctrine of the
international brotherhood of the proletariat, regardless of race. It is
hard to overestimate the damage to the overseas image of America's material
success that was done by our nation's continued racial segregation into the
l960s. Marxism, aided by the information systems that produced its apparent
efficiency, seemed to offer the possibility to all peoples, regardless of
color, of access to a dignified existence and material sufficiency.

Beginnings in the l960s The Soviets had already begun encouraging socialist European countries to
adopt Soviet-style centralized information systems through Comecon
conferences organized in the l950s, but their major international efforts
were launched after the establishment in l963 of Comecon's Permanent
Commission for the Coordination of Scientific and Technical Research. One
of the commission's working groups had the responsibility of raising the
professional qualifications of information workers in the socialist member
countries (after l962 joined by Mongolia, while Albania ceased
participating in Comecon after l96l). Before l970, 11 conferences were
organized by the working group, including one in September l965 on "the
training and continuing education of personnel of scientific and technical
information centers of the Comecon." The conference proceedings were
usually published in the various national East European bibliographic
journals .

During this time the working group also organized exhibits on information
technology and published a dictionary of information terminology. More
advanced training in information science was offered after l963 in
months-long continuing education courses set up at Moscow's All-Soviet
Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), part of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences since l952. Here more than 300 students from
Comecon countries were trained between l963 and l972. VINITI also sent
syllabi, curriculum plans, and information science and pedagogy textbooks
to the central scientific and technical organs of the Comecon countries so
that they could run mini-VINITIs of their own.

The Soviet's International System for Scientific and Technical Information Moscow's support for international information training was stepped up
after the founding in l969 of the International Center for Scientific and
Technical Information in Moscow, a Comecon organ whose mandate was to
develop and maintain an international system for scientific and technical
information to standardize and centralize the information systems of all
the Comecon countries. A formal Institute for the Raising of the
Qualifications of Information Workers (IPKIR) was founded in 1971 and
located at VINITI. On the basis of bilateral agreements with different
socialist countries (but largely paid for by Moscow), IPKIR educated - just
between l972 and l976 alone - 853 students from Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany,
Mongolia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. IPKIR, in
collaboration with the International Center, was to serve for the remaining
years of the Soviet Union as a central point for

recruiting information science trainees from the socialist countries;

pooling training materials and methods;

research on training;

lectures by leading specialists; and

consultation on training the personnel for different national systems of
scientific and technical information.

A special word is necessary here to explain the importance attached by the
Soviets to the standardization and centralization of socialist scientific
and technical information systems. Before World War II the Soviets had
combined enforced standardization and centralization with a command economy
to compensate for lack of resources and trained manpower. Whatever the
inefficiencies of such a system, they were more than counterbalanced - in
Soviet eyes - by the enhanced control it offered. It is these two qualities
- compensation for inadequate resources and enhanced possibilities for
political control - that underlie the (continued) fascination of
centralized information systems for totalitarian regimes in less developed
countries.

A principal task of Moscow's International Center for Scientific and
Technical Information was the establishment and maintenance of a socialist
international scientific and technical information network, called MSNTI.
The MSNTI was consistent with the United Nations National Technical
Information System (NATIS), developed by UNESCO in the early l970s. NATIS
proposed the development of coordinated national scientific and technical
information systems which would ultimately become the basis of a global
standardized information network, UNISIST, specifically supporting the
creation of national bibliographies for countries without them. NATIS was
based on the principle that the best information on printed materials could
be supplied by the countries in which they were produced. The Soviets
intended their international system to demonstrate superior Soviet
experience in information centralization, as well as international
Soviet-led socialist collaboration in information science. Furthermore, the
system would compensate for the inability of socialist countries short on
hard currency to pay for multiple copies of expensive Western journals.
Ideologically, the international system was justified as a means of
supporting the struggle of the masses for peace and disarmament - an
argument that reappears like a mantra throughout the Soviet information
professional literature on the system.

In practice, the system did ultimately create an obligatory set of
standards for information formats and numerization for all Comecon
information centers. These centers, usually located in the capitals of
their countries, worked as massive photocopying centers of journals held by
the centers. As early as l97l the International Center for Scientific and
Technical Information in Moscow published its first list of registered
members of the international system. The l973 edition of registered members
contains elaborate descriptions of the history and activities of the
different member countries' participating technical centers (Bulgaria
having the most, besides the USSR, with 68; Mongolia the least, with 2).

In support of the activities of the international system, numerous
conferences were organized in the l970s and l980s in all parts of the
socialist world, many with the support of UNESCO, others under the aegis of
International Federation for Documentation (FID) and of the project of the
International Federation of Library Association (IFLA) for universal
bibliographic control. Comecon paid for five separate international
conferences on standardization and centralization between l975 and l979
(and in l978 actually organized a separate academic department and course
of study on the International Scientific and Technical Information System
at IPKIR in Moscow). Increasing international access to burgeoning new
Western information systems was a factor in the priority given by the
Soviets to their own international system. One Soviet scholar in l98l
pointed to the necessity of fusing a common "proper orientation" to the new
Western material which would "arm the socialist brother countries for the
struggle with bourgeois, reformist and revisionist ideologies. A major
challenge for the immediate future was seen for information professionals
in the socialist countries who would "have to evaluate this new material
with class consciousness and a partisan approach."

A recurring theme of the l970s conferences was the need to counter the
overseas influence of the U.S. Library of Congress' MARC (MAchine Readable
Catalog) system, which was expanding its original purpose of making LC
cataloging machine readable and becoming an international system for the
exchange of bibliographic information in machine-readable form. The Soviets
claimed that this enabled the United States to exercise influence on the
information activities of participating countries.

Publication Distribution ProgramsBesides organizing conferences, the Soviets supported a massive
international book publishing and distribution program which aided its
international information system. In 1982 alone the USSR produced 74.5
million books in 56 non-Soviet languages, a large proportion of these being
in scientific and technical fields. By l986 one out of every four books
produced in the world was published in the Soviet Union. The overseas
distribution of publications included extremely low-cost or free issues of
the review journals published by VINITI in Moscow, which by the mid-l970s
was annually reviewing and abstracting one million scientific and technical
articles from 25,000 journals in 65 languages.

Assistance in Education of Information ProfessionalsPerhaps the most important method of assistance - and certainly the one
whose influence was the greatest - was in the area of the education of
information professionals. Ultimately thousands of young people from all
the socialist and non-aligned nations of the world were brought to the
Soviet Union, taught Russian and given free higher and continuing education
in library and information science at IPKIR, at VINITI and at the faculties
of library and information science at Leningrad's Krupskaia Institute, the
State Institute of Culture in Kiev and in other locations. The Leningrad
faculty alone graduated (with 5-year diplomas) about l00 fully
Soviet-subsidized foreign students each year between l975 and l99l, in
addition to granting Ph.D.s to students from Vietnam, Cuba, Syria,
Afghanistan, Cambodia, Laos, Guinea, Congo and Kenya. In total, there may
be close to 20,000 Soviet-trained information professionals working in the
developing world today.

ConclusionAll of this Soviet international assistance in building information
infrastructure has now stopped. In l998 the Leningrad Institute (now the
St. Petersburg Academy of Culture) will graduate its last
Russian-subsidized foreign students. Together with the possibilities of
higher and continuing education, the subsidized flow of scientific and
technical information from Moscow to its former client countries has also
stopped as Russia's publishers struggle to enter the market economy. At
this date, the only former members of the Soviet bloc that have substantial
access to current scientific and technical information are those like
Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland which have the hard currency to pay
for it.

At the same time, the non-Soviet agencies that in the l970s and l980s
subsidized information to hard currency-poor countries have radically
diminished their assistance. UNESCO has been downsizing since the l984
withdrawal of the United States, and the United States Information Agency's
(USIA) once-lavish book distribution programs have shrunk dramatically. The
United States, no longer competing with the USSR for the affections of the
non-aligned developing world, has shifted its focus to influencing Russia
itself. Since l994, under the aegis of the Freedom Support Act, the USIA
has been subsidizing the American library and information science education
of scores of students from the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile the
developing world is littered with centralized, government-operated
information centers operating in a virtual vacuum since the Soviet
information supply has vanished. Unless another substitute for the market
system is found (and the USSR acted for 30 years as such a substitute),
this vacuum will continue far into the 21st century.

Pamela Spence Richards is professor, School of Communication, Information
and Library Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is
immediate past chair of SIG/III and was three-term chair of the ASIS
International Relations Committee.